[fiction, instead of lies]

"Life itself is the proper binge." Saint Julia Child

Ah, it’s baseball season – about which I know virtually nothing. However, since we have a pair of raccoons living in our yard, when I ran across this little short from 1931 about baseball-playing tanuki (狸 or たぬき) – or Japanese raccoon dogs, as they’re called – it appealed to me on a number of levels. This whole clip reminded me of nothing so much as author Alan Gratz’s trip to a “besuboro” game in Japan a few years ago.

Tanuki in Japanese culture are like foxes were once considered in American lore – as trickster gods or spirits. Considering the sheer amount of mess a raccoon can make, not to mention a pair — if tanuki are anything like them, I understand why.

These are my sister’s old braces – molded specifically for her infant-toddler-child-girl-woman legs and feet, so we can’t pass them on, only recycle them. Mom couldn’t bear to do it when she was small, so they’ve been in the attic for the past decade, a silent testament. Like the pencil marks on my friend Bean’s kitchen doorway which track the progress of her daughters, now both in their late twenties/early thirties, these are a witness to how much the years have changed the Bug. This is a record of the surgeries to correct the tiny bones, of the structuring forced on her dimpled limbs to enable her feet to lie flat, her ankles to support her weight, her back to stretch out, her body to stand tall. At nineteen and fairly petite, there aren’t dimpled elbows and knees left, and there probably won’t be too much more lengthening of those femurs, but stature from other directions – cognitively, of course, because every teen needs cunning and guile – wisdom – confidence. But what records do we keep of those? How do we know when we’ve become what we’re meant to be?

“running” your own life takes practice

stand up for yourself
don’t let them walk over you
just put your foot down

we’ve “stumbled onto” a solution

you don’t stand a chance
’til you can stand on your own
so take the first step

roll on you crazy diamond

“I’m fun-sized, not short,”
she takes this life in her stride
while finding her feet

“I think that black people have been conditioned for so long … to only look at the level of representation — are we visible? — that there was an inordinate pressure that that visibility is positive. I hope that we’re getting closer to black people being able to engage their image of themselves as art, which means complication, which means you do some good stuff and you do some bad stuff because that is what it is to be human. …

You need the variety, Steve, you need it. We exist in the middle: We’re not demons or angels — we’re human beings. And so that is what needs to be reflected in the art of our nation.

Today’s Morning Edition on NPR was an interview with novelist and television screenwriter Attica Locke about representation in the African American characters she writes. She was talking about the challenges of writing characters who stand in for the many – which it seems happens often. People look at one person of color – or one gay person, or one Jewish person, or one autistic person — and that one person is EVERYONE – every female person of color, every male Jew, every differently-abled child, every gay woman that person has ever experienced or encountered… which is why, when I was growing up, it was hard to hear so many times that “people are looking to you, looking at you, people are watching, people see you…” because it felt like I was responsible for how and what people thought, and who can grow up straight under that kind of pressure? Many are the crooked trees.

Yet, a bent twig can be a positive thing – at least that’s what second generation graduates of Mills College are called. Bent twigs, based on the aphorism, ‘’Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’ according to Alexander Pope’s Epistles to Several Persons (1732). If the twig is going to bend anyway – and it will, we have an insistently pushy world – the best we can do is shape it strongly.

These poems are for the nephews, five and seven now, flexible little twiglets stretching up in a windy world with acid rain and thin soil

sans leaves, still lovely

a solo sapling
savoring its solitude
shows silent splendor

dig your roots in

bend in the wind, but
don’t rustle for every breeze
sink deep and grow straight

branch out

crowned head and shoulders
above the crowd, you will be
noticed. stretch taller

competing with yourself

regardless how tall
looking up shows you new heights
aim high. race mountains.

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” ~ Ernest Hemingway, (1899 – 1961) A Farewell to Arms, 1929.

A coat of color
hides a lack of many of things.
makeup or war paint?

you had nothing left
found yourself empty, but now
gutted, you can float

the irony is
some things only find their purpose
in being emptied

These poems are for everyone who had such a bad experience with a thing that they quit it, even though it was once their dream. This is just to say that you could go back to it, and kick its recalcitrant butt, if you so chose. Just sayin’. You’re stronger than you think.

This is the wee mad puppy. I am meant to be charmed by this thing, but I am less charmed by puddles on carpet, chewed shoes, and stealthy back-of-couch dog dirt. Five months is how long a puppy must have been on earth to enroll in a training school. It feels like Sebastian has been four months old now forEVer.

*with sincerest apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay*

so it is, and so it will be, and puppies are puppies

I am not resigned
to the gnawing away of
perfectly good shoes

sit. no, really. now.

never truer words:
you can teach an old dog new,
new dogs don’t know jack

good luck, puppy school

“fetch” is hard-coded
in canine heads. he brings back —
o, look! it’s a squirrel

what, you were going to JUMP on me? Nu-uh

People frequently say to me that they couldn’t write for a living (for a given value of “a living;” this little boat wouldn’t float sans Tech Boy) – that they lack the discipline and focus and “how do you get yourself to sit down every day and try?” What’s funny is that sometimes… I don’t know. I don’t. There’s an ambiguity to the process, an opacity to the ritual. It’s a lot like cooking or drawing — sometimes you tweak a little here, smudge a little there, that’s enough to make a standout presentation, other times you scrape away the pigment from the canvas and slap on new gesso and flush the contents of the pot down the toilet. I don’t know how I do this. And, when I have those weeks of doubt when I finish a project and am scrambling about for the next (not that I don’t have tons of ideas, but at times, none of them seem worthy of time or birth into a world crowded with short attention spans and a plethora of worthier thoughts), and when I am rolling around with an abscessed brain, plummeting through the earth, scrabbling with blunted nails for a hold on anything so I can pull myself up again — then I realize that in more ways than you’d think, it comes down to the simplest thing: choosing.

One of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, What I Have Learned So Far concludes with the line, “be ignited, or be gone.” Choose to light up the night, or go out. Choose to lock eyes with your fear and stare it down, or blink – but nothing hovers in between.

When we lived in Scotland, we took a lot of photographs of the pictogram signs – the warning signs were especially amusing. We don’t have a lot of them near where we live, but they tend to be in tourist-y areas which attract crowds of non-native speakers, so the pictures are necessary. The exaggerated imagery – necessarily exaggerated to help people understand – still amuses.

“Writing demands the cracking of idealized image, and that can be as disquieting as it is enlivening. It requires a deep intimacy with oneself, a revelation of one’s mind to others, that may be deeply uncomfortable. The cure for my writers’ block is to sit with this discomfort and work my way into it, whether in a direct or roundabout way, until the truth emerges.” – Shilpa Kamat

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if one is going to have an existential crisis, one is generally going to have that crisis late, on a Sunday night, so that Monday morning, too, will be just as ragged, uncertain and disastrous. This seems to have been true in school, when things were due on Monday at first period, and continues to be true now that sleep is necessary and a new pile of Things To Do crouches possessively over the pristine new week. Right when I need to chill out and go to sleep, I can’t. It never fails.

Note to self: do not think about your writing before you go to bed. Just don’t.